248 – How Gravity Hopper will take care of all your Gravity Forms

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the WP Builds podcast, bringing you the latest news from the WordPress community. Welcome your host, David Walmsley, Nathan Wrigley.

Hello there. And welcome once again to the WPE Bell's podcast. This is episode number 248. Entitled how gravity hopper will take care of all your gravity forms. It was published on Thursday, the 23rd of September, 2020. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'm going to keep the housekeeping pretty short this week.

Other than to say, head over to WP Builds.com forward slash subscribe, where you can keep in touch with everything that we produce each and every week. The main thing that I'm going to mention this week is the fact that the page builder summit is coming back around again. In fact, it's happening between the 18th and the 22nd of October this year, 2021.

Those dates again. The 18th to the 22nd of October, 2021, head over to the page builder, summit.com website, which you can probably figure out is over it. Page builder, summit.com. And over there, you'll be able to see a list of all the speakers and the presentations. We don't exactly finalized all the exact dates for everything, but I suggest that you go over there and have a look.

See who's appearing. Get yourself signed up to the list. There's a button on the main page of the website over there. And if you click on that button, we will keep in touch with you. You'll be put on our list and we'll let you know as, and when things start to finalize properly. So that's page builder, summit.

Dot com head over there and sign up onto the list by clicking the join, the wait list button. It really is going to be a marvelous event. The previous two have been very good. I'd appreciate it. If you listened to the podcast and you want to spread the word, please do use your Twitter feed and your Facebook and all of that.

Goodness, to share it out. Once more, page builder, summit.com 18th to the 22nd of October, we would love to see you there. If you're interested in sponsoring that event, then please head over to page builder, summit.com forward slash sponsor. And over there, you'll be able to find some details about the different things that we can offer you if you would like to sponsor the event.

And I would really hope that one or two of you. Okay, let's get onto the main event of the podcast this week. This is episode number 248. And in this episode, I am chatting to a really nice chap. Joshua . He has got a product called gravity. And it does a whole load of interesting stuff. So if you've got something like main WP or go daddy pro you can link all of your websites together and update them, update the plug-ins and the themes and all of that kind of thing.

This, the idea of gravity hopper is that it does something similar in that it is a central dashboard for all of your gravity forms. And as the podcast goes on, Joshua explains how all that works. Doesn't it. Tom in there, apart from just having this central dashboard, it works with multi-site. You can save away typical form constructions or collections of fields that you produce.

You can add notes and organize yourself in a much, much more efficient way than normal. I hope that you get something out of this. You never know. At the end of this, you may be wanting to reach out to Joshua and we provide links for you to do that in our show notes. One thing that I would like to mention, Joshua has been very kind and he's given all WP Builds listeners a 30% off coupon code.

I bet you can guess what the coupon code is. Yes, it is. The coupon code. WP Builds all lower case. I'm not sure that will matter, but if you want to get yourself 30% off, use that coupon code at the checkout. So here it comes. Gravity hopper number 248. I hope that you enjoy. Hello there. Welcome to the WP Builds podcast.

Once again. Thanks for joining us today. We have an interview and today the interview is with Joshua . How are you doing Joshua?

[00:04:15] Joshua Vandercar: I'm doing well. Thanks for having me.

[00:04:17] Nathan Wrigley: I failed to ask you properly at the beginning before we started recording exactly where you are. I recall that we briefly touched on that, but tell us where your baby.

[00:04:29] Joshua Vandercar: So I'm in Fort Wayne, Indiana kind of Northeast corner of the state been here about five years now, recently moved down from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Okie

[00:04:41] Nathan Wrigley: doke. And how long have you been using WordPress? Are you a seasoned WordPress developer? Are you relatively new on the scene? What's your, what's been your journey with WordPress?

[00:04:51] Joshua Vandercar: I think it's been just about 10 years now. I've been using it as a developer, Probably about five years prior to that, mostly a user and getting familiar.

[00:05:04] Nathan Wrigley: The reason that we've got you on the podcast today, I actually can't recall how we ended up discussing this, but we've somehow connected.

And we've got you on the call today so that we can talk about something called gravity hopper. I always like it when people have a URL, which is identical to their product name, because then it's really easy for everybody to find it, essentially go to gravity, hopper.com. At any point during this episode, if you want to find out what's going on.

But in, in a, in a couple of minutes, maybe less just briefly tell us what gravity hopper is.

[00:05:41] Joshua Vandercar: Yeah. So gravity hopper is a plugin, uh, primarily for developers that sits alongside a gravity forms, plugin, and it serves as. Uh, kind of a network hub a dashboard for managing your gravity forms across a network of sites.

So if you think of the plugins, like main WP managed WP, infinite WP, all those that, that act as a centralized hub for managing your WordPress sites. This is a similar thing, but for managing your gravity forms across the network additionally it serves as a template engine or a building, a framework for your gravity form.

So you can set up groups of fields or sections of fields that you want to reuse across your form.

[00:06:32] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Let's get into the bits and the pieces of it, but I'm just curious to begin who's the sort of intended audience here, because obviously if you're a, if you're a mom and pop store and you've got one website, this doesn't feel like it's going to be a good fit for you.

So who have you built it with? And I'm interested to know what was the, what was the thing that got you building it? Were you scratching your own itch? Was this something that you suddenly thought, you This is missing. This is something I could actually make do with.

[00:07:05] Joshua Vandercar: Yeah. So I think it's a very niche, uh, audience that this serves. It is. Like, I think many other that the plugins that they come on the scene, it is one of those scratch, scratch my own itch type things. About four years ago, I started my own business developing and hosting and maintaining WordPress websites.

And as I began building. Those sites. I was a user of main WP. And so I found that there was some needs that I had there and I started digging into developing some solutions for that. But additionally, I started building a lot of forums and I found that I was often building the same event, registration form.

I was often building the same donation form for some of the nonprofits, same contact form and. It began to get tiresome adding field after field, every single time uh, gravity forms does have the import export options. So I could use that. But I wanted to be able to manage those a little bit more easily.

So it was a scratch my own itch thing. I wanted to build something that I could use and other developers could use. That's, that's one of the, one of the things I think I found as I continued to maintain sites, I was like there's a lot that could be done to help us developers improve our workflows and our processes and save time.

So that's kind where it started, development about the idea probably about three years ago and slowly just uh, Yeah, hacking away at development.

[00:08:50] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, that's interesting. I'd be curious to get your thoughts on that because you've landed exactly where I thought it was going to land.

And that is to say that this really feels as if the best solution here is for people who are probably running an agency or something. And maybe even somebody who's running an, we say niche, it's that of niche. So I'm going to say, yeah, no, that's okay. I think it's just a difference of where you live on the planet.

And so if you've got an agency which is targeting a specific niche, and you mentioned they're I don't know, property websites or something like that you are going to have really complicated forms to build. And there's probably a lot of work that's gone into perfecting those forms over time.

You're right. You could go and deploy with an export and an import. It's just an additional step. And so if you are producing, I don't know, dozens, maybe hundreds of sites in your agency each and every year. This is just time saved,

[00:09:47] Joshua Vandercar: yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. Prior prior to deploying the gravity hopper, you know, we have the main dashboard. Plug in gravity hopper, which can connect any remote sites. Prior to that, I had built a, uh, a prior iteration, which was installed on a multi-site install of gravity forms and allowed you to manage your forms across all the child's site. Of your network as well.

And so there's in developing this, I've seen well, okay. I think I need this and then I need this and then I need this. And a lot of it was yeah. Scratching my own itch for projects that I was working on. Yeah.

[00:10:35] Nathan Wrigley: The, so just to be clear, it is. Solely for those people who are using gravity forms. It's not, it's not a kind of replacement for gravity forms that uses gravity forms.

And so just quickly touching on the licensing arrangement, you would have to make sure that let's say you were deploying this through gravity hopper onto 10 sites. You'd have to be mindful of. Not treading outside of the boundaries of what your license is actually allowed, but that's on you as a, as an agency or a developer it's got nothing to do with your plugin necessarily.

You don't manage gravity form licenses or anything like. Correct. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So let's imagine that we've got a fresh install of WordPress because that's how it works. We need a brand new vanilla install of WordPress in order to put gravity hopper on. Is that right? Is that kind of like.

Something that you have to do, or is that just the preferred solution? Mang WP, you have your own install and it basically does nothing apart from main WP things. That's the same here. We, we have installed just for gravity hopper.

[00:11:43] Joshua Vandercar: Yeah. That's definitely the preferred setup, um, both for, reliability of the solution, but also security of the data that's passed.

Back and forth from your sites. Okay.

[00:11:54] Nathan Wrigley: And in terms of the resources that would use, I'm guessing that you could probably get away with a fairly modest size, you, you wouldn't have to go to the sort of $500 a month tier to make this work. You're going to be on fairly affordable hosting on a Monday.

[00:12:12] Joshua Vandercar: Yeah. Yeah, you can use a pretty basic setup for your, uh, dashboard. Most of the actions that you're going to be taking from your network are going to be manually triggered by you. So there's not a whole lot of, Cron tasks running in the background to keep things sinked. So yeah, pretty simple setup should work.

[00:12:32] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, great. Okay. Let's imagine for the sake of argument that we are doing, that we've got our dedicated install of WordPress set up. It's got no plugins on there at all. What's the process? What's the workflow that we have to go through. It's fair to say that most of our audience know how to install a plugin, so we don't need to do that.

But, um, but beyond then, what happens? What are the steps that we need to do to get this up and running? You can be as detailed or as generic.

[00:13:00] Joshua Vandercar: Sure. Yeah. So first step is installing that the dashboard plugin, the gravity hopper main plugin, and then any sites that you're going to have on your network.

We also include a child plugin that manages things on that child site and make sure that the integrity of the forms, is kept and, ensures that that some pieces are in place on those child's sites. So you can also install that. Childhood gravity, hopper, child plugin. And then on your dashboard, you can start connecting your sites in order to do that.

You just type in the URL of your site, click connect, and it is going to go to that child's site. And. It sets up it authenticates itself with the application password feature of WordPress. And so we'll set up an application password for your user that you're signed in as and it sent back to the dashboard and say, okay, we're authenticated.

And that's the communication is going to keep things

[00:14:07] Nathan Wrigley: sinked. Okay. And does it forgive me if you've just said this, but does it. In any way, shape or form install gravity forms on that child's site? Or do you need to be in the child's site? Get all that up and running first. Ah,

[00:14:24] Joshua Vandercar: good question.

Yeah. Gravity forms would need to be installed on the chat side. It doesn't handle that for you.

[00:14:29] Nathan Wrigley: And any of the, I forget what they're called in gravity forums, the, the sort of the dependencies, the add on modules or add-ons okay. Does it it, again, it doesn't handle any of those, but I presume it's, it, it it's interoperable with them.

If you've got them active.

[00:14:46] Joshua Vandercar: Yes, it is. And actually one of the features of gravity hopper is that it runs kind an integrity check on your forms. And so let's say I'm deploying a form to one of my child's sites that is dependent upon, let's say the Stripe add on, and I don't have that Stripe add on installed on.

The child's site. When I go to that child's site and look at that form, it's going to give me a little notice Stripe isn't installed here, but this form requires it. Um, yeah, it does integrate with those atoms, but it doesn't. Override them. Okay. Yep. Yeah.

[00:15:22] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So more or less we've described the, the way that you would put your parent's site, let's call it that your parent's site is up and running all by itself.

And then we need to go to each of our individual child sites, make sure that we've got gravity forms and it's correctly licensed and we've got the add-ons enabled. Okay. So how do we then link our parent's site? And get forms, working on posts and pages and wherever else we might need them on the child side.

Just talk us through that word flow workflow. Sure.

[00:15:57] Joshua Vandercar: So gravity halfer manages the forms. It doesn't, it doesn't manage pages on the child's site. So it will allow you to Kind of fetch any of your forms from the network sites into your dashboard site. So you can pull those in, make a connection with that form.

Once you've done that, then you can edit that form on your main dashboard and kind of sync or send those changes back out to. That specific network site or to any other network sites that you might have connected. So if it's a contact form that you're wanting to throw out to all your sites, you can have the same contact form on every single Realty site you have, you can send it out to all of those.

Network sites and the change will be distributed.

[00:16:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So if I'm on the child's site and let's say that we've got this contact form and the exact same contact form is on 10 other sites, I can, or I cannot modify that particular contact form from the child's site. Or do I need to go back and let's say either rebuild it for all the sites or just rebuild it for the one site.

I guess my question is, can I modify things on the child's side or am I always touching the parents?

[00:17:16] Joshua Vandercar: Yeah. You're always touching the parent's site. We actually have it protected on the child's sites so that you can't edit the form. You can, you can add, like specific notifications or maybe there's a couple other like small tweaks that you can make to the form, but yeah.

Kind of locked down on the child sites once you've made that connection. Okay.

[00:17:42] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And so again, imagine we've got this contact form, simple contact form, nothing complicated about it. A couple of fields and. How do I make sure that the correct people are receiving the, let's say notification emails, if that's what this contact form is designed for?

You know, there's a few fields, but I need to make sure it goes to all the right people. I've got one form, which is distributed to 10 sites. How does that all work?

[00:18:10] Joshua Vandercar: Yeah, that's a good question. Um, at the moment, the. The solution for that is to use merge tags and custom code on the child's sites to, to ensure that's, you heading to the proper people.

[00:18:28] Nathan Wrigley: So you would have to, now you're going to have to describe that, cause I'm not really following what you mean. So I would have to, I would put the merge tags in. They have to be done on the child site or they could be handled. As generic merge tags on the parent site or would it have to be done specifically one site at a time?

[00:18:49] Joshua Vandercar: Yeah, they would have to be done. It could be done on the parent's site and sent out, but then you'd have to have code on that child's site to, handle that merge tag. Alternatively you can, I th I think I had it set up where you can, set up specific notifications on those child sites for that.

As well.

[00:19:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And. So, if I wanted to do something much more complicated, you can, obviously, you can obviously do that. And I could send that out to the same 10 sites. The same principle would apply. I'd have to make sure that I don't know any fields, any information that needed to pass was going to be correctly, use it using the correct merge tags.

If you like the question that I've got then is where does the. Actually resolved is the form on, is the actual form taking place? Is the processing of the data taking place on the child's site or is it all happening on the main site?

[00:19:53] Joshua Vandercar: Yeah, so process all the processing of the data happens on the child site.

Right? None of that data will touch, the network dashboard.

[00:20:03] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So that's an important point in terms of things like GDPR and data compliance. It's not if you've got an agency with a hundred websites and the forms are all being filled in on a daily basis, it's not like you're one.

Parents site is suddenly the repository of thousands of data points, email addresses, and so on. It's all still taking place inside in the normal fashion in the child sites,

[00:20:25] Joshua Vandercar: correct? There's no data that's passed back and forth. Yeah, form is

[00:20:29] Nathan Wrigley: submitted. Okay. Okay. You mentioned that you can simplify the sort of workflow of building sites I can see on your website.

There's some nice sort of graphic showing how you can group things together and you can combine fields and all of this. That's interesting to me. How does that work? How do you do. If you've got a form with complicated fields in it, how do you speed up that workflow?

[00:21:02] Joshua Vandercar: Yeah, so I think that's one of the big kind of powerful features of gravity hopper is that templating of fields. So, so any of the forms that are either hosted on my hub or that are. On the child sites on my network, I can pull those up within gravity hopper, and it's going to show me a, an overview or a summary of all the fields that are included.

In that forum and I can select a whole section or I can start selecting specific fields. It'll show me, fields that are conditional upon one another. So I make sure that I include all of them. If this field is conditional on this one, I make sure I include both of them in that group.

And once I have that group of fields, let's say it's maybe I, I need to reuse emergency contact information. For a, for an individual. So I have, a person's name, phone number, email address, and I like to group all of that in this emergency contact information section, I can grab all of those fields.

I can send them over into my hopper for, to be used later on any registration form or event form that I am building a solid I'll be able to easily. Just pull us into an inform rather than having to reconstruct that every time I build a

[00:22:25] Nathan Wrigley: great, okay. I I think I'm understanding that correctly, but I'm going to paraphrase it and correct me as I go.

If I have muddled it up, you can basically create on the child's site, you could build a form and then push it back. To your main site and in some way, categorize tag that as, okay, this is now what I'm using for emergency contact details, for example, and you'd have a, you'd have a combination of fields that you'd configured correctly.

And then you could go to a different site and just pull that back off the parent site. And it would just immediately just drop into the.

[00:23:05] Joshua Vandercar: Yeah, so at the moment, it's, it actually all happens from the dashboard website. So you wouldn't be pushing it to your dashboard and then pulling it from your dashboard.

You'd actually be. Pulling it into your dashboard from the child site. Got it. And pushing it out to a

[00:23:22] Nathan Wrigley: another. Okay. So I've misunderstood that. So you would build it on the parent's site and then you could just push it out. Yeah. Okay. And that's cause the

[00:23:32] Joshua Vandercar: authentication and the connection with the child sites, is, is happening from that dashboard.

It's using an application password, but those child sites don't have that same authentication to. The network. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:23:44] Nathan Wrigley: That makes sense. Yeah, that was that was poorly thought through on my part. The the, the next thing I want to ask is it possible, let's say for example, that I've got a simple contact form and I've got an emergency set of fields.

I don't know what you call those groups of fields. Is there a word that you use for those when you combine a bunch of fields and save it away as like a temper.

[00:24:07] Joshua Vandercar: Yeah, I've just I've had, I haven't really settled on a word. I've used it, a number of things there in a hopper, so I've called them hops oh, I

like it.

[00:24:16] Nathan Wrigley: No, no, that's good. I like that. Let's go with that. So let's say that I've got a hot for basic contact form. I've got to hop for emergency contact details. Is it possible to combine the hops? Into one form. So in other words, I've got two or three parts, two or three hops, all being dragged into the one form.

[00:24:38] Joshua Vandercar: Yes. Yes. So you'll be able to any number of hops that you have in your hopper. You can queue them up in the order that you want and click add to form or append them to an existing form if you'd like. And it will just.

[00:24:55] Nathan Wrigley: Create that forum. Okay. This feels like a really powerful area actually. Doesn't it?

Because if you have built multiple forms before, you've probably, I don't know. I was the other day building a form where I was just doing a basic pricing calculator, and you'd put in the number of months and then you'd put in some other variables and out at the bottom would pop out a number based upon what you were doing and, That it took took a few minutes, but I squirrel that away somewhere.

In this case, it's just sitting on this one website and I'll probably have to go back and export that if I wanted to. But in this case you could then suck it back into your parent area and have that as a hop, to be reused anywhere in combination with any other forms. That's really cool.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I can see the, it makes building. Complicated forms more, a bit like Lego, you've built, you've got your little hops and you're building the wall out of the little hops that you've got rather than the process that you have to do one field at a time at the moment.

[00:25:57] Joshua Vandercar: And that's where that integrity check comes in that I've mentioned earlier. Cause if I've added a hop into my hopper that said that uses a field from some third party, add on let's say gravity was unique ID or something. Well, if I add that into a form and I push it out to a site that doesn't have gravity was unique ID it's, that's going to break things.

So I want to know that, oh, okay. I've I'm using this ad on here. And it's going to tell me that.

[00:26:29] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So yeah, if you inadvertently Chuck together, a load of hops, which basically will never, ever produce a valid form, you'll be notified because there's dependencies that are missing or perhaps some conditional logic doesn't work because the fields that it's conditional upon are not actually present and so on.

Okay. Okay. That's nice. You've also got the option to add notes, which feels a bit like commenting in code. Tell us about the field now.

[00:26:55] Joshua Vandercar: Yeah. So it's a separate ad. And I CA I have, there's a group of plugins that I developed along the way that are kind of utility plugins. And so at that field notes, is it, I feel like that's probably one of the handiest plugins that I've put out there.

Because as I'm developing forms, I'm often wanting to know what is this field writing, you know, behind the scenes, is this okay? Here's a, Yeah, here's a field. Do I want to know that it's being dynamically populated by some code on the back end of the site, or I want to know that these are the only valid values that can be passed to it.

And you know, they're intending to populate them as URL parameters on specific pages or whatever the case may be. It allows me to add. Specific notes to each field on a form and also specific notes for the form itself. And that way, I have kind a, I can track my development and see what has been built here and down the road.

If I need to hand this site off to someone else, or I need to hand this form off to someone else, it's all stored within the form object itself. So even if I were to export that form and send it somewhere else The field notes plugin is installed. It will read that back in and some would say, okay, all right, this is what's happening with this form.

This is how it was pulled together. Here are some of the things I need to know.

[00:28:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. This is probably going to be the hardest thing for you to explain during this podcast, because I'm about to explain how you actually build these forms. And obviously that would be really easy if we could see a screen, but I'm going to challenge you to do that.

Nevertheless what is, what is the UI for actually constructing a form? Is it the exact same UI as gravity forums? What I know, it's not because I'm looking at your website, but explain how it works and what the processes are for building all these sort of like Lego blocks where we described.

Yeah.

[00:29:06] Joshua Vandercar: So actually it's it hooks right into the gravity forms, UI. So in the gravity form, You you you'll be able to build a form and then if you want to save those hops in the right side of the gravity forms, UI, there's the field settings panel, where you can add fields and you can modify fields.

We've added just another tab, right alongside that.

[00:29:32] Nathan Wrigley: This is hopper. That's the one that I'm looking at. Yep. Yep. Yep.

[00:29:35] Joshua Vandercar: And so you can click that hopper and it's going to present all of your form fields. When you click hopper and then send to hopper it will, it'll present all those form fields and a condensed view so that you're able to view your whole form a little bit easier and select the actual fields that you want to go in there.

So all you need to do is click plus on any section or specific fields you want to add to that hopper click, add to hopper and it's. Save them over there. Okay. So similarly you, can you hit that hopper and then to add into your form, you can search for and select a specific hops that you want to

append.

[00:30:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it, it is the, the modern gravity forms UI just really does look like I'm like the block editor, doesn't it. And so you've, you basically. The gravity forms UI, but with this additional tab, which enables you to save things to the hopper and drag things out of the hopper to put into the form.

And and it looks really nice. It comes along with this stuff that you're familiar with, all of the form fields and the sections and all that kind of stuff raises the question. Is there any, is there any feature that would be available in gravity forms that for reasons. Unknown to me right at the minute you, you can't make use of there's some limitation in gravity forms itself that you haven't been able to uh, achieve.

There was some problem with coding it up or what have you.

[00:31:05] Joshua Vandercar: Sure. Well, feeds are always a tricky thing with forums. Eh, at the moment, most. Most feeds that you add to a gravity form are not exported with that form. So if you think about, you've added a. The Stripe add on, and you have a feed that integrates with Stripe, or if you have a MailChimp and, a feed the integrates with MailChimp when you export the form, those feeds are not exported with that form itself.

And I think usually that's because those feeds are very specific to the site itself and the authentication that site has with that third party. And so that's, that's one of the trickiest things that, that I've found how to, how to handle. So what we've done with gravity hopper is those feeds are still sent with a form when you send it off to the third party site, but they will still need to be configured on that site.

So you would need to configure that feed. Actually authenticate with that third party service.

[00:32:18] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Aside from feeds, anything else that, that you, you can't pull off with gravity hopper that you would be able to do if you were just to use individual installs of gravity forms?

[00:32:30] Joshua Vandercar: Well, in embedding forums, obviously you have to go to the child sites to figure out where you want these phones to live on your sites, but that's it that's yeah. That's

[00:32:44] Nathan Wrigley: all it comes to mind.

[00:32:48] Joshua Vandercar: using it. I'll get this bug replacing. Hey,

[00:32:50] Nathan Wrigley: how about this better that you've got nothing to say to that question that you've got loads to say, actually, when you think about it, the the, the, the question occurs to me. Did any of this get done in consultation with gravity forms? If you, do you keep in touch with them or is this just, I don't mean in terms of partnerships or anything I just meant, is this something that they're aware of?

Uh, have you been speaking to them and making sure that it's the kind of software that they're happy to have bolted on?

[00:33:19] Joshua Vandercar: Sure, sure. Well, I actually work as a support engineer for rocket genius in gravity forms. So I've been employed with them since well, beginning of this year. So, so gravity hopper uh, you know, I started building that about three years ago or had the idea and have. Developing it's in, then they hired me on to help users that are using gravity forms. And I've had a lot of encouragement. There's no official endorsement. I do have to say that, but I've had a lot of encouragement and have been inspired by the other developers that work in the.

Yeah, the certified developers for gravity forms.

[00:34:06] Nathan Wrigley: That's really nice though. It's nice to hear because it's sometimes you wonder if there's, down the line will, this will like, could, for example, gravity forms have cut you out or something like that, but it's nice to hear that is very, very unlikely to be the case.

Yeah. That's. Had

[00:34:27] Joshua Vandercar: pushed back.

[00:34:27] Nathan Wrigley: So that's it. Yeah. And they're right down the hall. So probably wondering, does this work with kind of multi-sites does it work? Is there any sort of configuration of WordPress, which this you know, might not work with? The only thing that comes to mind really would be multi-site I guess.

[00:34:45] Joshua Vandercar: Yeah. Yeah. I don't know that I've tested the gravity. Plugin with multi-site. But I, as I mentioned earlier, I did develop this separate plugin that has gravity hopper multi-site global forms, which is specifically for being installed on a multi-site network and allows you to manage all of your network forms for that specific multi-site, across all of your child sites on that network.

Yeah, I'm not I'll have to run the tests on gravity hopper when you're connecting remotely to a child's site. Yeah, I think it I would think it should work. I can't think of anything that was stand in the way of that. No. Okay.

[00:35:29] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. The, so in terms of getting onto maybe the more nuts and the bolts kind of thing if what you've been explaining today, piques people's interest, they'll probably want to be heading over to the, your website, gravity hopper.com.

As we mentioned a little while ago, and one of the main menu items on there, you've touched on some of these already is plugins, and I can see that there's eight listed so far. You've got the main gravity hopper and then. You've got what I presume are things like ad-ons for gravity forms themselves, multi-site global bonds.

You mentioned the utility bundle, organized forms, field notes, form integrity, keyboard shortcuts, and easy repeatable exports. If there's one of those or two of those that you want to drill down on that you're proud of that you think that our listeners would be well-served to know about go for

it.

[00:36:23] Joshua Vandercar: Sure. Well, I multi-site global forums was probably the first one that I had put out there. And I know there's been a number of people that have been getting some good use out of that. I've had good feedback on that. I should probably, I probably need to give it some more attention. But, uh, it's, it's been chugging along and doing its job for folks.

So that's good. I, I would say probably the two that I'm. Did I really like using our field notes. Like I said, I D I like being able to track my development and know how I built a forum when I come back to it months later to be able to see what went into that and not have to dig around for you know, to re re figure out what I've, what I've done with my forms.

So that's a huge one to that. I like having installed on my sites. And organized forms is one that I think was that was, that was more an answer to it. A need that I was seeing users have. I think I saw people posting in, community forums and on Facebook groups and stuff. Like I need to be able to group my forms cause I have 200 forms on my site, or, or more whatever.

And I need to be able to. To organize those. I need to be able to group them into folders to be able to search and filter them in a, in an easier way. So that's, that's the one that I've appreciated having out there. And so it is,

[00:38:03] Nathan Wrigley: it's um, it's like a sort of faceted search for things as it, you can drill down into taxonomies that you've applied to those two groups of four.

Yeah. Yeah.

[00:38:15] Joshua Vandercar: And that gift that I have on there is actually a little bit older UI. What it currently has is a dropdown. Yep. I'm up near that all active inactive that you can select a specific folder that you want to

[00:38:27] Nathan Wrigley: drill into. Yup. Yup. Okay. So that then leads me to the sort of pricing question and I'm, I'm currently on the page that for the plugin that you just mentioned, the organized forms.

And I can see at the bottom of that page, we've got some pricing, but I don't know if that refers to just this particular plugin, the organized forms one, or if it's the pricing for the gravity hopper as a whole. But I can see that you've got a pricing of $29 per year for one site $49 per year for three sites.

And then you've got the pro license, which is 1, 3, 9 for unlimited sites. Plus. Brings along for the ride, all of your five utility plugins as well.

[00:39:15] Joshua Vandercar: Yeah. So yeah, the pricing after, after having this out there for a little while and seeing where we're interest was, this is how I simplified it.

Single site, three sites for those individual plugins and then for unlimited sites offering. The whole utility bundle with all it, all five of those utility plug-ins plus any that might develop in the future. Okay. And that does not include the gravity hopper dashboard. So there's a separate bundle that includes the dashboard and.

All of these utility

[00:39:51] Nathan Wrigley: plugins. Okay. Where, where would we find that? Is that on just the gravity hopper page itself? The plugin for correct. Okay. So if you go to the main menu plugins and then gravity hopper, there it is. I see it. Okay. So we've got pricing of. One network hub, $99 a year. So that's for your parent's site which is bundled with the form integrity plugin, and then 1 9, 9 gets you a pro version of that.

But it's the same thing as one network site, but you get the bundle of all of the the ad-ons as well. Got it. Yeah. Okay. I'm curious. This is something that. You've not seen much before, and this is totally off piece. I hope you forgive me for a moment. You just below your buy now button you've you're committing to it would appear that you've got some sort of environmental policy, which I'm really intrigued by.

So if you buy the. At $99 a year, it says your purchase plants, seven trees, renews offset of 250 kilograms of carbon dioxide. What's this all about? Is this just your sort of personal approach to the environment and where do you, I'm guessing that you have some sort of third-party organization that you put a slice of the slice of your profits toward.

[00:41:08] Joshua Vandercar: Yeah. So that was actually inspired by is that cats at gravity view? Oh about a month ago, he was, they were at some sort of, Twitter. They had a tweet out there that said, click this and we'll plant trees for you. And I clicked it and I saw that there was a service that they're using called ecology or ecology ecology.com and.

Yeah, it just intrigued me. I was like, oh that's great. I love that. And I saw that they had an API and yeah, I've actually built a plugin that integrates with easy digital downloads so that when users will purchase here, it will automatically plant trees for them. It'll offset carbon.

With their receipt, they actually get to click through and see, okay. Here's a specific project that that, no, that's great. Yeah. So I actually just posted in post status about the post status slack yesterday about that plugin and I'll probably have some information out there. But yeah, it was, I was just inspired and, I think being able to keep our planet clean.

Yes, let's do it.

[00:42:28] Nathan Wrigley: I really like that. And also just the fact that you, it's not some policy buried in the depth. Service level agreement or something like that. It's at the Bali bond, which I think is really nice. So you get seven trees. If you buy the $99 license and you get a, you get even more trees, you get 20, 20 trees planted.

And, uh, I just think that's great hats off to you for making the effort to do that. We're at the 40 minute mark, more or less. So we've run out of time, but I would encourage anybody to go to gravity, hopper.com, go and check it out. If there is anything that I bungled or anything that I just blatantly missed, or didn't give you an opportunity to talk about, please go for it now.

[00:43:14] Joshua Vandercar: I, I don't think so. Yeah, I did set up a discount code for your listeners

[00:43:21] Nathan Wrigley: that that'll be something worth mentioning. Let's hear it. What is that?

[00:43:26] Joshua Vandercar: So you can use the discount code WP bill. On the site and that that's a one use discount code per user. And it'll give you a 30% off site-wide anything.

[00:43:40] Nathan Wrigley: There you go. Not only do you plant trees, but you give our audience 30% off as well. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. That's really good. I I'm totally taken me by surprise. That's lovely if that's the case and there's no more of the actual plugin to mention. Do you make yourself available online?

Do you have twitter handle or an email address or a contact form show. You've got quite a few of those available online where people can reach out if they've got questions. Yeah.

[00:44:13] Joshua Vandercar: So there's a contact form on gravity, hover.com. You can, can follow us on Twitter. Just gravity hopper.

I'm also personally on Twitter at at U a M V. So there's four letters, UAM V. I'm happy to answer any questions that folks have. Look for. Yeah.

[00:44:33] Nathan Wrigley: Connecting with folks. You got in early on the Twitter by the sounds of it. Anybody who's got a full letter. Twitter handlers. A yeah, he must've been in there right at the beginning.

That's

[00:44:44] Joshua Vandercar: great. I am I had used caps in my username, so I actually have capitalized and I've been trying to work with tutors. Cause I w I would love to have them all lowercase. That's cleaner now. Oh, and you can't modify it. Can't

[00:44:55] Nathan Wrigley: do it. Oh yeah. I can see you've got capital you little by little, a capital M capital D.

Yeah. That's quirky. I've never. There we go.

[00:45:03] Joshua Vandercar: It's my initials, basically. Joshua and then MV.

[00:45:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Nice. Okay. Joshua, that was really enjoyable. Thank you very much. I hope that you enjoy that episode. Joshua giving us lots of information about his plugin gravity hopper. Don't forget if you want to avail yourself of 30% off, Joshua has been very kind to give us a coupon code and that coupon code is WP Builds.

Use that at the checkout and get yourself a significant amount of if you have a need to have a central dashboard and all the other things that Joshua mentioned for your gravity for. Just before you go, I'm going to mention one other thing. And that is our page builder summit. Don't forget it's happening very soon.

In fact, the dates are the 18th of October to the 22nd of October. You can find out about all the presenters and join our wait list over at page builder, summit.com. Pink button and get yourself on our wait list. And we'll keep you updated. Please spread information about the summit to all of your friends, neighbors, cats, and even iguanas.

That's all I've got for you this week. We will be back next week for another episode of the WP Builds podcast. Before that I'm going to fade in some cheesy music and say, I like the name.